Plastic bags: a staple under siege

Don Loepp

As a reporter, it's interesting to see how other media cover a topic that I've been covering for a long time. It happens all the time when you're working for a daily newspaper -- when a local TV or radio station decides to report on a story after seeing the print report, or an out-of-town newpaper or wire reporter pops in to do their own version of something I've been covering.

In the news business it's sometimes called parachute journalism, although I don't think it's all bad. I've seen plenty of examples of journalists jumping into an unfamiliar topic and doing an excellent job. And after all, that's something that journalists are trained to do, right? To become experts on a wide number of topics, at least to a point where they can report on them accurately and include context that readers need.

Michael Rosenwald, a reporter on the Post's local staff, does a nice job with the story. He looks beyond the typical arguments about plastics and talks to most of the right experts and players in the debate. Rosenwald even talks to workers at a local Advance Polybag factory, putting names and details to the industry's argument that plastic bag taxes and bans have an impact on people.

The fact that many are refugees from Burma's military dictatorship was an interesting detail.

Overall I think the Post did a good job with this story. Definitely a step up from its previous coverage of plastic bags and related issues.

Don Loepp – Loepp was named Plastics News' editor in April 2011. After earning a journalism degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1983, he worked as a reporter for eight years for the Milwaukee Journal and for the Daily Press and Times-Herald daily newspapers in Newport News, Va., before relocating to his native northeastern Ohio to join Crain. He joined Plastics News in 1991 as a reporter, was promoted to news editor in mid-1993, and became managing editor two years later.
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